Role Playing in a Role Playing Game

Recently a work colleague has decided to start playing WoW with his friend, as it had been a while since I leveled up a melee class and as I haven’t yet done the Kalimdor questing post-Cataclysm I decided to join them and made a Night Elf rogue. I made my character, named him Axeholme.

They had decided to play on a role-playing server and I didn’t think much about it. Now for folk that may not be aware what is special about a role-playing server, it is a server where instead of simply playing the game you immerse yourself in the game a bit deeper than just running around and killing things and doing quests. Ratehr than waffle on and get it wrong I decided to let Blizzard define it:

Role-play means that you play the role of a character living in the game’s fantasy world. How much or how little you role-play is up to you; some players construct entire background histories for their characters and adopt unique mannerisms when they’re ‘in character’. Immersing yourself completely in the fantasy can be a lot of fun, but tastes vary, and it’s perfectly alright if full immersion simply isn’t your style. This kind of role-play is purely optional, and we provide separate Role-Play realms for those who prefer to play in an immersive world.

Despite playing since 2005, I too have never actively played Warcraft in a way that would fit the role-play description. So, now I have decided to role-play as I level up. This will be a completely new adventure for me and I’m not sure how much I will enjoy it, but if I never try it, I’ll never know.

The tricky bit here is that I decided to do this after creating my character, and Axeholme isn’t a very apt name for a Night Elf, but having spent 5 hours getting him to level 12, I didn’t feel like re-rolling, so now I have increased the difficulty of my first hurdle, creating a backstory which is something that already seemed a bit scary.

Being an addon addict, I know that there are addons specifically for role-playing that can help the RP experience, but I had no idea which one is the one to use. Fortunately, the lovely Anne Stickney over at WoW Insider had recently written an article on one called My Role Play. So I decided to opt for that one.

Some details have been relatively quick to sort and fortunately it allowed me to bypass the name issue as I can simply make Axeholme, the nickname. Now of course I need to find a reason for this nickname.

The basic info eyes, height, weight and age were a bit easier as I went with exactly as my character looks for simplicity (and of course I won’t be able to forget). For the race I did debate whether to go High Elf but decided against that because I wasn’t sure on whether that would be easy to pull off, but opted to advertise myself as Kaldorei which is the correct name of the race. As for age well I had always been led to believe that Night elves lived for thousand of years so opted for a rather generic old mainly because it allows you a bit more scope with a timeline.

Other info snippets are home and birthplace I am not sure where I want to call home yet so I have simply put down “No fixed abode” that may change but the biirthplace got me thinking and I considered a few locations (Quel’Danil and Quel’Lithien in particular) but none seemed appropriate due to the timeline and therefore not accurate. I ended up opting for Suramar, the old Night Elf capital city because it was destroyed and has no in-game ruins meaning we have a bit of leeway with locations.

Description and history is a bit harder especially as I’m not familiar with the expectations but hoping to see what others have done and will develop this a bit more. As I delve into this whole RP thing, I’m already picking things up and in a few weeks I’m sure Axeholme will be a bit more fleshed out than he is at present.

Have you role-played in WoW or any other MMO? If so, what tips would you give to a new RPer, liek myself?